My Year with Eleanor (13 page)

“Thermal turbulence,” Boom explained. “Caused by hot air rising off the earth. It's always worst in the afternoon when the ground is the hottest.”

The plane was jerking, dipping. We were slaloming toward the landing strip. For the first time that day I was genuinely afraid for my safety. Instinctively I grabbed the bottom of my seat with my hands, but remembering my conversation with Dr. Bob, I immediately let go. An alarm in the cabin buzzed relentlessly:
Eh! Eh! Eh!

Boom started flipping switches furiously. Oh shit. Something was wrong. After all that, only to be killed on the return? I cased the woods to our left. If we crashed into the treetops, maybe they'd soften our landing? No, it was going to be one of those fiery affairs, I could tell. Black smoke corkscrewing into the sky. Firefighters in silver suits. Local news helicopters muscling in for the best aerial shot to capture the carnage. Or maybe the force of the crash would eject me, Goose-like, from the plane? Only I would break through the Marchetti's flimsy canopy. “Are you sure there were two pilots?” the first officer on the scene would ask Slick. “There was only one body.” They'd find me a week later lodged in one of the trees. Dental records would be procured for identification purposes, my face having already been eaten by wildlife.

Eh! Eh! Eh!
Boom was still fumbling, not telling me what was going on.

Matt had been so cute earlier taking pictures of me—
the last photos!
—before we'd taken off. After I was gone, there would be newspaper stories about me and the project, the sad irony of it all. It would scare the shit out of readers. Inadvertently, I would uninspire thousands. They'd take to their couches, eschewing bravery for television sitcoms and cop shows. I'd be the anti–Eleanor Roosevelt.

The noise stopped and Boom settled back in his chair. I exhaled with relief. In retrospect, the whole thing had lasted less than ten seconds.

“That was the automatic landing gear alarm,” he explained. “If you go below a specific altitude and you've forgotten to lower the wheels, it lets you know.” I could hear the wheels whirring into position. He chuckled. “Sometimes the plane is smarter than we are.”

“I'm glad you didn't tell me that before we took off.”

The wheels
eeeaaaak
ed onto the runway. As we were taxiing, Boom ripped back the canopy and, without realizing it, bonked me mightily on the head.

“Doesn't
that
feel good!” he exclaimed into the breeze.

As we rolled to a halt and climbed out of the cockpit I spotted Matt waiting off to the side on the runway. When he saw that I was grinning and not in need of sedation, he pulled out a video camera and peppered me with questions.

“Would you do it again?” he asked.

“I would, actually!” It was slightly embarrassing to admit. I'd spent weeks worrying and whining about this one hour. The scariest thing I'd done in my life so far turned out not to be all that scary—fun even. It made me wonder what else I was missing out on. Also, what other things in my life was I unnecessarily wasting time and energy worrying about?

“Was it scary?” Matt asked as I climbed down the wing.

“Nah,” I said, then qualified: “Well, maybe a
little
during the landing . . .”

Matt took pictures of Boom and me, then of the two of us standing with Lenny and Slick in front of my plane.

“Can I get a few more shots of you two in front of the tail end?” Matt asked Boom. “Would you mind?”

“Take as much time as you want. We get all sorts of crazy requests,” Boom said. “We've had women strip down to bikinis and pose lying on top of the plane. Someone else had us take a picture while she did a handstand on the wing.”

Later, after we'd said our good-byes, I opened the car door to find a paper plate on my seat with half of a funnel cake on it. “I went to the car show next door,” Matt said sheepishly. “Saved you some!” As he negotiated our way back onto the Long Island Expressway, I paused while licking the sugar off my fingers.

“Hey wait, I never got my call sign!”

“What?”

“Boom told me I'd get my fighter pilot nickname at the end of the day. He must have forgotten.”

“So call him and ask.”

I winced. I never liked calling strangers—a ridiculous admission for a former reporter, I know. Even as a kid, it had taken years before I could comfortably order a pizza. It got much better as I got older; then e-mail and texting arrived like manna from heaven for the telephone challenged. In the last few years, especially, as my life shifted even more toward writing and the Internet, I'd regressed to being the child who wished I could ask a parent to call on my behalf.

I picked up the phone to call Boom several times over the next week. In the end, I chickened out. I went to the Air Combat USA website, e-mailed the webmaster and got Boom's e-mail address from her. After a few throat-clearing lines of “hey, remember me?,” I finally asked the question: “So what's my call sign?”

A few days later I received a reply. “Despite your initial quavers, ya done good,” Boom wrote. “Aggressive to the point where I had to throw a leash on you to keep from overextending. Hence, from henceforth, in fighter pilot circles, you shall be known as
Fearless
. Hope you do fly with me again, because afterward the cry will be, ‘Fearless, you're buying the beer!' ”

For a few moments, I just stared at the e-mail, smiling. I'd felt like a bit of a coward for e-mailing instead of calling, but now I was grateful that I could keep this conversation forever. Still, I wanted to atone for my sin. I picked up the phone, and when the person on the other line picked up, I said, “Mom? You won't believe the e-mail I just got . . .”

Chapter Seven

My life can be so arranged that I can live on whatever I have. If I cannot live as I have lived in the past, I shall live differently, and living differently does not mean living with less attention to the things that make life gracious and pleasant or with less enjoyment of things of the mind.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

F
all continued apace. So did my Year of Fear with a random assortment of daunting tasks. I took a pole-dancing class. Jessica had refused to go with me (“I'm sorry, Noelle, but I have my limits”), but I left with considerably more respect for the hardworking ladies of the exotic dancing industry. Despite a lifelong fear of needles, I submitted to acupuncture, a horrifying one-hour event where I watched a man painfully insert needles into the tops of my feet and the tender webs of skin between my toes. I went back to trapeze school and spent two months training for a recital, where I performed—in costume—before hundreds of people.

I didn't wear makeup for two weeks. If this doesn't sound scary, you're not from Texas. In Texas, if you leave the house “without your face on,” you might as well actually leave the house without your face on. People will react with the same level of revulsion. As a freelancer, I had days where the only person I saw was the guy who worked at the deli on the corner. Yet I found myself applying makeup to go order a sandwich. After more than fifteen years of wearing makeup every day, I realized, I'd come to think of my made-up face as my real face. Without makeup, I felt vulnerable,
less than
. So I decided to stop wearing it until I made peace with my face. My mom, who slept in her makeup for the first two years of my parents' marriage and to this day was always fully fragranced, was appalled. When she found out I went to a party barefaced, she said, “I wouldn't check the mail without makeup on, let alone go to a social gathering. That's just not—well, it's not
done
.” It took two weeks, but I knew I was finally comfortable with myself when I spotted a former crush from college in a subway station and instead of ducking my head or flinching, I marched right up to him and, with rosacea and acne on full display, said, “Hey! Long time, no see!”

Now four months into the project, I decided that, to understand Eleanor, I was going to have to see her house. And to truly see Eleanor's house, I also had to see Franklin's house.

“Franklin's house?” Matt sounded confused as we climbed into bed. I was sleeping over at his apartment that night because, bless him, even though he'd driven in from Albany just a few hours before, the next day he'd be sacrificing his entire Saturday to accompany me upstate to visit the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York. “You mean they didn't live together?”

“They did for the first twenty years of their marriage. I'll explain on the drive up tomorrow.”

Matt set his reading glasses on the bedside table and had just turned off the light to go to sleep when I suddenly threw back the covers and leaped out of bed. “Oh no, I haven't done my scary thing for today! I've been so focused on tomorrow that I forgot all about it.” I pulled off my nightshirt—a black T-shirt Jessica had given me that said
I SLEEP AROUND
—and wriggled out of my panties.

Matt squinted at me through bleary eyes. “What are you doing? It's one in the morning!”

“I'm going to run down the hallway! Be right back.” Running down the hallway naked had become my go-to if I got to the end of the day and nothing scary had come up. I'd yet to run into a neighbor, but it never failed to be scary. Before Matt could respond, I threw open his front door and tore out of his apartment.

T
he ride was two and a half hours, about as much time as I needed to explain to Matt the complicated living arrangements of this couple. Franklin's father was twenty-six years older than Franklin's mother, Sara. James Roosevelt was a widower with a grown son Sara's age. By the time Franklin came along in 1884, James was fifty-four and not much interested in parenting. He even had Franklin call him “Mr. James.” But Sara tended to her son like a prizewinning orchid. She raised him at Springwood, the family estate on the banks of the Hudson River in Hyde Park. The house staff addressed the boy as “Master Franklin,” and his smallest accomplishments were met with glowing praise. And while this kind of acclaim can produce disastrous results (children who overestimate their talents, enter the real world, and wilt at the first hint of rejection or criticism), it worked out brilliantly, not just for Franklin but for America as well. It takes a considerable amount of presumptuousness to believe you can lead a country out of a Great Depression. James Roosevelt died when Franklin was eighteen, causing Sara to cling even more possessively to her only child. She was cold toward Eleanor when the two announced their engagement, as she would have been toward any rival for her son's affections. When Eleanor moved in with them at Springwood, it was the stuff of bad sitcoms.

“Poor Eleanor,” Matt said. “I wouldn't want to join that party.”

There was no escaping her mother-in-law. As a wedding present, Sara built the couple a town house in Manhattan. However, this was one of those “gifts” where you give a family member a present you really want for yourself, knowing you'll have full access to it. For she'd also bought the plot of land next door and built an adjacent town house for herself that connected to theirs through sliding doors on several floors.

“You were never quite sure when she would appear night or day,” Eleanor glumly recalled.

“It looks so . . . presidential,” Matt said, gazing up at Springwood from the driveway. We had just strolled through a vast apple orchard and were standing in front of a colonial revival mansion with a tour group of forty Caucasians in casual sportswear. Our guide, a pink-complected woman named Meg, who was dressed like a park ranger, positioned herself on the stairs before the columned portico entrance.

“Franklin stood in this very spot after all four elections to greet the crowd that had come to congratulate him on his victory,” she told us. “Since Hyde Park was a Republican district, he joked, ‘I know you didn't vote for me, but I am glad to see you anyway.' ” The crowd chuckled dutifully as we followed her into the shadowy foyer.

Franklin was a collector, according to Meg. His stamp collection totaled over a million. He and his mother displayed his acquisitions proudly in the entrance hall. A group of framed political cartoons he found amusing hung neatly on the far wall. Nineteenth-century naval paintings adorned another. (“He served as assistant secretary of the navy for seven years,” Meg reminded us.) Next to the door was a flock of stuffed birds Franklin shot as a boy. They were posed in flight to look like they were alive, which always struck me as missing the point; stranger still, his mother forbid the servants from touching them, tending to the dusting herself. If Franklin had died before her, I suspected she would've had him stuffed and then propped him up in a wingback chair. Instead she did the next best thing. Seated in front of the birds was a life-size bronze statue of Franklin that Sara commissioned when he was elected to the state senate at age twenty-nine.

Matt and I shuffled down the hallway behind the other tourists. The rooms were cordoned off with small gates, but you could peer into them as if it were a life-size dollhouse. We waited our turn to read the plaques explaining what room we were looking at and its significance. On our left was a cave of a den Sara called her “snuggery” where she conducted the business of the house. The furniture was too large for the space and, like Sara herself, had a way of making people feel small. One person, of course, took the brunt.

“Your mother only bore you,” Sara once told Eleanor's son Jimmy. “I am more your mother than your mother is.”

Add to that the occasional public insult, such as announcing to Eleanor during a dinner party, “If you'd just run your comb through your hair, dear, you'd look so much nicer.”

Everything you need to know about the Roosevelt family dynamic can be found in the seating arrangements. Sara and Franklin sat at the heads of the dinner table. In the imposing wood-paneled library, a pair of matching, handsomely upholstered chairs sat on either side of the fireplace. One was for Franklin, the other for Sara. God knows where Eleanor sat, probably on the banks of the Hudson River trying not to throw herself in.

“For almost forty years, I was only a visitor there,” she later wrote of Springwood.

In 1918, Franklin returned from a trip stricken with pneumonia, so Eleanor unpacked his bags for him. Inside she found a bundle of love letters addressed to Franklin. She recognized the handwriting instantly. They were from a woman named Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's secretary. It was yet another example of Franklin's audaciousness. It's one thing to cheat on your wife with your secretary, but someone who cheats on his wife with his
wife's
secretary is clearly operating on a different level. At that point he and Eleanor were thirteen years into their marriage; she'd borne him six children (one died as an infant). Eleanor offered to grant Franklin a divorce, but Sara intervened, knowing that such a scandal would ruin her son's political career. She threatened to disinherit Franklin if he went through with it. The Roosevelts decided to stay together on two conditions set forth by Eleanor: Franklin had to break off his relationship with Lucy Mercer immediately, and he could never share his wife's bed again. Ironically, only after that did Eleanor feel secure enough in her marriage to finally assert herself with Sara. She started, awesomely, by blocking the sliding doors connecting the twin town houses with all the heavy furniture she could find.

The Roosevelts spent the summer of 1921 at their summer home on Campobello Island off the coast of northern Maine. One afternoon, Franklin returned from a swim complaining of chills and back pain and went to bed early. “By the next morning, he could hardly stand, and by the next day, he could not stand at all,” Eleanor remembered. She slept on a couch in his room and nursed him for nearly three weeks, but nothing could be done. Franklin had contracted polio and was paralyzed from the waist down.

Back at Springwood, portable ramps were placed throughout the house and pulled up before guests arrived. Franklin hid his paralysis in public to avoid seeming weak, sometimes even wearing leg braces that locked at the knee, which allowed him to stand upright. He gave the illusion he could walk by using a cane or leaning on someone's arm while using his hips to swing one leg forward at a time. Even during his presidency, he kept up appearances. When leaders came for meetings, he was already settled in his chair and stayed seated until they left. The media knew he was confined to a wheelchair, of course, but didn't feel it was appropriate to “out” the president on a personal matter. They only photographed him when he was sitting in a car, behind a desk, or leaning against a railing while delivering a speech.

He thoroughly charmed the press corps with his quick wit and naughty boy personality. At cocktail hour he corralled reporters and staff members in the cloakroom beneath the stairs because Sara disapproved of drinking in her house.

“It was made into fun,” one journalist later recalled. “With shrieks of laughter we'd gather with the President of the United States, the coats hanging up on the wall, he in his wheelchair whipping up the martinis and drinking as if we were all bad children having a feast in the dormitory at night.”

Having fully explored the first floor, our group drifted back to the main staircase where we took turns peeking in Franklin's hand-powered elevator, originally installed so the servants could haul the Roosevelts' heavy trunks upstairs after trips overseas. Franklin disliked standard wheelchairs so he designed his own, a regular wooden chair with wheels at the base of the legs. One of these sat inside the elevator taking up most of the compartment.

“Good thing he wasn't claustrophobic!” a dad guffawed loudly from beneath his baseball cap.

“It operates on a rope pulley system,” Meg explained. “Franklin used his arm strength to raise and lower himself.” As I looked inside, I was reminded of one of Franklin's most famous quotes: “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

“Couldn't he afford a motorized one?” the dad asked.

“FDR refused to have an electric elevator installed. He feared that in the event of a fire, the power would be shut off and he'd be trapped and burn alive. Fire was the one thing he feared because he couldn't run from it.”

Meg divided the group so we could tramp upstairs in shifts to the second floor. Matt and I maneuvered ourselves in front of a family with six young children. This mansion should have been airy with its glossy white walls and soaring ceilings, but the navy carpet sucked in the light. It was stifling in spite of its thirty-five rooms and nine baths. We were all a little creeped out by the Birth Room, which still housed the bed where Franklin was delivered. Sara's deathbed request was that the room be rearranged to look exactly as it had when he was born in 1882. We hurried on to his sizable suite at the end of the hall. The bedroom was left intact after his final visit two weeks before he died. The customized phone with a direct line to the White House waited expectantly on the bedside table. Franklin's books and magazines remained strewn about the room where he'd left them. It was an eerie sight, like viewing the scene of a crime. I tried to imagine what my room would look like if I'd died suddenly and Meg started giving tours through my apartment. (“As you can see, her Chia Pet and the ass print on her sofa cushion are exactly as she left them . . .”)

There was very little to see when I stuck my head into Eleanor's minuscule quarters next door, a converted dressing room. It was startling in its bareness, just a daybed, no private bathroom to call its own.